Word: alaskas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Stepping to the podium at the University of Alaska in 1953, the commencement speaker made an eloquent plea: "Be bold!" Mining Engineer Ernest Newton Patty knew whereof he spoke. Apart from a first-rate mining school, which Patty himself had built up, the ill-equipped campus near Fairbanks was little more than a "moose college" for young Alaskans who lacked the brains or money to attend colleges Outside. Skeptics suggested that it might well be converted into a penal or mental institution...
When Engineer Patty finished his call for "maximum service to Alaska," the board of regents named him to succeed retiring President Terris Moore, a brilliant rescue pilot who (quipped the campus newspaper) "spent more time in the clouds than in the classroom." Last week there was no such complaint as President Patty, 65, announced his own retirement in favor of William Ransom Wood, 53, academic vice president of the University of Nevada. All things considered, the nation's northernmost campus (100 miles south of the Arctic Circle) has never been in better shape...
...Point Barrow. The University of Alaska might dismay some Outside purists. "I wouldn't send my son here," concedes one faculty member privately, "but I enjoy the work immensely. What a challenge! It's like working in a slum." One reason: the university is obliged to accept any Alaskan high school graduate (at free tuition), has a 40% freshman drop-out rate. Unlike most state universities, it also has twice as many men (545) as women (274), no solace for half the men on 30-below winter nights...
...Alaska's once rough-and-ready students have been so tamed that lads who used to brawl merrily in taverns now while away winter's "cabin fever" by placidly staring at TV's Maverick. If students still use car trunks as deep-freezers for fresh game, they seldom skin moose in the dormitories and hang the carcasses outside the windows. President Patty has even clamped down on beards, mukluks and Levi's; slacks and jackets are now fashionable. To those who protest, Patty snaps: "Fellow, civilization has caught up with you. I advise...
...machine and hair clippers. Short of money last month, Sik worked off some of his winter's food bill by sled-hauling drums of gasoline (at $7.50 apiece) across the river, hopes to save enough money to get ten acres of land bulldozed by year's end (Alaska's homesteading laws require clearance of ten acres by the end of the second year, 20 by the end of the third). "I'd never go back," says Carol Sik, 23. "I don't see anything there worthwhile like I do here. Nothing belonged to us. Here...